Unsettling the Ranks: 1930s Zulu-Language Writings on African Progress and Unity in The Bantu World

ABSTRACT While much of the extant scholarship on The Bantu World has addressed the English language content, this article shifts the focus to previously unexplored 1930s Zulu-language writings on African advancement and unity. It makes an intervention into the study of African explorations of the possibilities and limits of progress amidst the abiding challenges and paradoxes of colonial modernity, in a setting characterised by increasing segregation. The Zulu pages, the article claims, enhance our understanding of contributors’ involvement in shaping and expanding the very constituency the editor, RV Selope Thema, sought to create. In particular, Zulu-language letters to the editor, often written in response to editorials and articles, convey ideas neither fully anticipated by Thema, nor fully articulated in the more restrained English pages. Located in the rich body of work on African print cultures, the article first discusses the ideologies behind this multilingual weekly newspaper. It then foregrounds the key place of Zulu-language usage in The Bantu World, as well as the (male-dominated) networks, publics and communities of readers created through the vernacular, which flourished despite attempts to marginalise African languages. An examination of key 1930s controversies over the notions of advancement, entrepreneurship and unity shows that the Zulu pages partly destabilised prevalent elite ideas of progress as intertwined with white patronage.